A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up,” early employee at 37signals)
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What is Ryan Singer’s background and why did he create Shape Up?
I often use this analogy of like if you're doing a home renovation, you can have like the most beautiful rendering of the new bedroom and we're gonna have these lamps on the side of the bed that are coming out from the wall. But if you haven't checked if there's electricity in that wall there or not, it's gonna drastically change the cost and the time and everything. What we need to do in a in a shaping session is we come out with some kind of diagram where engineers, product, and design, they're saying we understand. Understand that. So the first thing is we are not going to start something unless we can see the end from the beginning. We're not going to take a big concept and then say, what's the estimate for this thing?
We're gonna go the other way around and we're gonna say, what is the maximum amount of time we're willing to go before we actually finish something? How do we come up with a idea that's going to work in the amount of time
Today, my guest is Ryan Singer. Ryan was one of the first few hires at 37 Signals, and through his experience of building Basecamp and his 17 years of building products at 37 Signals, he wrote a book called Shape Up, which shares a very different approach to building software. Appetites instead of deadlines, a big focus on bringing design engine product together into a room to shape the plan, versus writing long PRDs or Trying to finalize designs before you start building. I've noticed more and more teams adopting the ShapeUp method, and especially with AI starting to change how we work and build product, there's a shift coming in how product teams will operate. And so I thought this was the perfect time to do a deep dive into the ShapeUp method.
This episode is basically going to give you everything you need to give ShapeUp a shot on your team or at your company to see if it fixes the problems they. You're having shipping great products. A big thank you to Dest Trainer, Bob Mesta, and Chris Speck for suggesting questions and topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a paid subscriber of my newsletter, you get an entire year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion, Superhuman, Linear, and Granola. Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Ryan Singer. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning.
That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered. By WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining A flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases.
If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's work OS. S dot com This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders, yes, like you, cringe when they hear the word integration. They're not fun for you to scope, build, launch, or maintain, and integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place. Lucky for you, the folks at Merge are obsessed with integrations. Their single API helps SaaS companies launch over 200 product integrations in weeks, not quarters.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Ryan Singer’s background and why did he create Shape Up?
0:00–14:23
2
How does the “appetite‑driven” approach differ from traditional Agile estimates?
14:23–29:06
3
What are the three core steps of the Shape Up method?
29:06–43:44
4
How are shaping sessions run and who should attend them?
43:44–57:52
5
What does a successful shaping session output look like?
57:52–1:11:47
6
Why is limiting scope to nine (or fewer) pieces important for teams?
1:11:47–1:26:00
7
When is the right time for a company to adopt Shape Up?
1:26:00–1:39:55
8
What resources (books, courses, consulting) can help teams start using Shape Up?
1:39:55–1:45:06
Speakers
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